By third grade, softball had become Cassidy’s second-favorite sport, so there was nothing unusual about being still sweaty from a before-school game of scrub. This morning it made his iron-hard desk seat even more uncomfortable than usual, not helped by the fact that he’d picked up some well-placed grains of sand in his underwear sliding into home for no particular reason.
A determined bumblebee was trying to bump his way through one of the window screens, and Cassidy watched it with interest as he desperately maneuvered his itchy butt cheeks around.
Mrs. Chickering, whose elaborately rhinestoned eyeglasses lent wings to her pretty dark eyes, was going on and on about the exports of Paraguay. She stopped in midsentence, marking her place with a forefinger and lowering her book. She focused her lovely eyes on Cassidy with ill-concealed exasperation.
“Quenton, do you need the hall pass?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then will you please stop squirming?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The class tittered, as it always did when someone got in trouble. Mrs. Chickering went back to discussing “hardwoods,” a mystery to Cassidy. It seemed to him that wood in general was hard (his satanic desk seat being a case in point), and if it wasn’t, then what good was it anyway? What use could possibly be made of soft wood?
Such are the diversions of a lively child stunned by humidity and boredom. Trying to take his mind from his inflamed backside, he surreptitiously kept track of the relentless bee.
At long last Mrs. Chickering put her book away and picked up a mimeographed sheet from her desk.
“All right, children, we have art after lunch, so Miss Baskind will be here. I expect that you will be well-behaved ladies and gentlemen and that no one will have to come fetch me from the teachers’ lounge,” she said. An excited murmur swept through the room. Everyone liked art.
“All right, settle down. In a few minutes we will be heading to assembly. As always, there will be no talking once we are in line, and no talking while we are marching to the auditorium. Does everyone understand that? Carl Wagner? Olivia Lattermore? Quenton Cassidy?”
The class chatterboxes dutifully muttered assent, but Mrs. Chickering paused for an interminable few seconds to emphasize her point. Not before everyone was suitably uncomfortable did she continue reading from the sheet.
“This morning in the auditorium we will see a movie from the United States Office of Civil Defense featuring Bert, the civil defense turtle. After assembly we will spend fifteen minutes practicing the duck-and-cover drills that we learn about in the movie.”
More murmuring now. This was shaping up to be a pretty good day. Any event that broke the monotony of memorizing the exports of South American countries was entirely welcome. No one really knew what civil defense was, but Bert was apparently a cartoon turtle of some kind, and anything having to do with cartoons, even a government turtle, was good.
It was the most natural thing in the world to Quenton Cassidy, his classmates, and everyone he knew, to be living in a booming, vaguely militarized postwar America that went to bed dreaming not only of Amana freezers and Mohawk carpeting, but also of mushroom clouds and foreign paratroopers.
The current boogeyman was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, commonly referred to as “the Russians,” a theoretically Marxist operation that in actuality was an entire society organized around the guiding principles of the United States Post Office.
The Soviets couldn’t for the life of them produce a decent pair of Levi’s or a grade of toilet paper that didn’t actually draw blood, but they at least knew how to make big old scary rockets, and so that’s exactly what they did.
Their counterparts on our side did likewise, and so, thanks to the world’s grown-ups, Cassidy and his classmates were obliged to drill for the apocalypse.
The eerie wail of the air-raid siren would send them scrunching up under their desktops and placing their tiny hands on top of their barely closed fontanels, ostensibly safe now from instant incineration, shock wave trauma, and a general hosing down with gamma rays.
From this position Cassidy once spotted Ed Demski across the row, arms folded dutifully over his asymmetrical noggin, eyes bulging from either terror or strain, Cassidy couldn’t tell which. When he was sure he had Ed’s eye, Cassidy widened his eyes and placed the tips of his index fingers into his ears and made the universal kid noise for a massive explosion.
Ed immediately went into head-thumping paroxysms under his desk, silenced only by the sudden upside-down appearance of a narrowed pair of winged eyes belonging to a very cross Mrs. Chickering. The two were unceremoniously dispatched to Principal Fravel’s office in the care of a smirking hall monitor.
Mr. Fravel tried to make himself seem appropriately stern and authoritarian but understood at some deep and fundamental level that it was something of a miracle these two waifs were even capable of mocking one of the most fundamental and sacrosanct principles of education in mid-twentieth-century America: that there was to be no talking or horseplay during a nuclear holocaust.